First OLPC deployment: now it’s real.

This week, Uruguay became the first-ever real, non-pilot deployment site of OLPC XO laptops. And I was there to hand out the first one.

The OLPC deployment here is being run as part of Proyecto Ceibal (Ceibo is the national flower of Uruguay), a presidential initiative to equip each child with a laptop. The Ceibal offices are housed in a Montevideo complex called LATU, or Laboratorio Tecnológico del Uruguay, which is a public/private sector cooperative technical lab now responsible for much of Uruguay’s technical certification and quality control programs, as well as serving an incubator role for various engineering and technical projects.

Uruguay is using three kinds of access points for blanketing the deployment schools and villages.